Word: pagans
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...masses. Valentine’s Day shouldn’t just be about reinforcing preexisting love affairs; it should be about hooking up with random people and somehow ending up with an unfathomable supply of “Sweethearts” candy. In the end, it is a pagan holiday, so let’s act like pagans, not self-satisfied assholes...
...Testament scholars have delved deeper into the pagan faiths that competed with early Christianity for followers, Mary's virginity has been challenged from the opposite direction--not as an impossible novelty but as a theme borrowed from the literature of the non-Jewish world. Stephen Patterson of Eden Theological Seminary lists divinely irregular conceptions in stories about not only mythic heroes such as Perseus and Romulus and Remus but also flesh-and-blood figures like Plato, Alexander and Augustus, whose hagiographers reported he was fathered by the god Apollo while his mother slept. "Virgin births were a rather Gentile thing...
...infancy narrative echoes Old Testament themes," he argued. "Are we to think that he accepted all that background but then violated horrendously the stern Old Testament [rule] that God was not a male who mated with women?" Other scholars claim that Luke especially might have been familiar with pagan models closer to the spiritual interaction that today's Christianity believes marked Jesus' conception...
...Luke, of course, once again had his eye on the pagan world. His key term is the census. In Jesus' time, the immensely popular Emperor Augustus was setting himself up not just as the ruler but also as the semidivine savior of the world. Wherever his censuses reached, his aggressive version of the Roman civic faith followed (along with his tax collectors...
...from the Old Testament book Numbers alluding to David's messianic status--"A star shall come out of Jacob and a [king] shall rise out of Israel." By making the star the object of the non-Jewish Magi's curiosity, Matthew showed that if he lacked Luke's detailed pagan background, he at least had some knowledge that stellar displays had meaning to non-Jews as well. In fact, stars were associated with the founding of Rome and the fall of Jerusalem, plus the birth of the usual suspects: Alexander the Great and Julius and Augustus Caesar. Even Herod reportedly...